Credit Card Companies To Punish You For Paying On Time Now

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No doubt you’ve all been experiencing the same thing as I have.  You have been a loyal, good customer of your credit card company.  Now we are getting the letters saying that our fees are going up, our interest is going up, or that there are fees where there never were before.

Now things are getting much worse.  The absolute most ridiculous business model ever is sinking even lower.

You floss regularly, yield to oncoming traffic and use your credit cards judiciously, dutifully paying off your balance every month.

You may believe that your exemplary behavior shields you from unexpected credit card fees. Sadly, that is no longer the case.

Starting next year, Bank of America will charge a small number of customers an annual fee, ranging from $29 to $99. The bank has characterized the fee as experimental. But card holders who have never carried a balance or paid late fees could be among those affected.”

Many credit card companies are going to implement non-usage fees.  That is, if you don’t use your credit card to their liking … you’ll get a penalty fee. 

We may finally be at the breaking point for most Americans to start living on an actual monetary budget.  It is going to suck in the short term, but in the long run will be better for your finances.

Even The Nobel Jury Can’t Defend Obama’s Peace Prize

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Anyone with the mental capacity above a 5 year old knows this Nobel business was nonsense.  Non of my Democrat friends have even tried to defend Obama’s non-award award.  Quite the opposite actually … even they are searching for examples of why Obama would qualify for such an award.  This may actually be even more ludicrous than Gore’s Nobel award … almost.

So what did the Nobel jury responsible for giving Obama the award do to defend their decision?  Very little.

Asked to comment on the uproar following Friday’s announcement, four members of the five-seat panel told The Associated Press that they had expected the decision to generate both surprise and criticism.

Three of them rejected the notion that Obama hadn’t accomplished anything to deserve the award, while the fourth declined to answer that question. A fifth member didn’t answer calls seeking comment.

“We simply disagree that he has done nothing,” committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told the AP on Tuesday. “He got the prize for what he has done.”

Ok then … what has he done?

Jagland singled out Obama’s efforts to heal the divide between the West and the Muslim world and scale down a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missile shield in Europe.

“All these things have contributed to – I wouldn’t say a safer world – but a world with less tension,” Jagland said

Ok, let’s evaluate this shall we?

The Nobel jury knew this was going to be a controversial decision.  Which means they fully understood that Obama is not viewed as someone who is deserving of this award.  Yet they gave it to him anyway.

One of them declined to answer a direct question as to what Obama had done to deserve the award.  Which means he was either forced into voting for Obama, or it was purely motivated by his own personal politics.

The other three believe Obama was deserving for a couple of reasons.

Healing the divide between the West and Muslim worlds was cited as one reason.  So how exactly has he done that?  None of our former enemies in the Muslim world are on any better terms than they were under Bush.  In fact, you can make a solid argument that things with Iran are much worse now than they were under Bush with Obama’s latest (and justified) verbal lashing of Iran’s nuclear program and the sanctions that followed.

I haven’t seen any evidence of the Muslim world being more accepting of the US because of Obama.  As I said before, none of our former enemies is on better terms with us because of Obama.  Several of our allies are on far worse terms now with Obama.  Canada, Turkey, Israel, Honduras, Columbia, and all of Eastern Europe to name a few.

Which leads me to the second issue the Nobel jury said qualified Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize … the missile shield.

Abandoning our allies’ safety and violating treaties and agreements with our friends is apparently a trait coveted by the modern Nobel committee.  How exactly is not coming to the aid of a weaker nation who has asked for our assistence to keep flaming missiles from raining down on their heads a qualifier for the Peace Prize?

The worst part was when Jagland admitted that Obama’s actions hadn’t at all made the world safer … just released some tension.

So pissing off our friends, not mending fences with our enemies, and leaving our weaker allies to hang out and dry against very curious opposition to missile defense while at the same time carrying on virtually the same policy as Bush in the War on Terror with no success in making the world safer is what gets you the Nobel Peace Prize these days?

We used to call that failure … now it gets you an award.

But liberating millions of people, fighting the enemies of the civilzed world, and having a net reduction in murders in the nations in which we are doing those things didn’t qualify the previous president?  I’m not even advocating Bush should have won the award, but at least show some common sense in the process.

The Peace Prize is no longer about making a safe world, but rather making a “world with less tension” … justice be damned.

Jagland asked who had done more in the previous year for the development of peace than Barack Obama.

CBS News had a crap load of suggestions earlier this month.  Like everyone else … Obama wasn’t even on their radar.

After CBS went over the profiles of several potentials for the Peace Prize, and the reasons they likely would not win (which involved political retribution for challenging China) … they got to their suggestion.  Frankly, I think they hit it on the head.

Another top candidate is Colombian senator Piedad Cordoba, tapped by CNN as the frontrunner; Cordoba, the head of Colombians for Peace, has tried to end the conflict between her country’s government and the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. She has secured the release of 16 hostages and was kidnapped herself in 1999; critics have complained, however, that she is too close to rebels.

Cordoba has done more in the past year to prevent an actual war than Obama.

Or how about Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan.  He’s an Islamic scholar who is a leading proponent of interfaith dialogue.  He led an effort in 2005 called the “theological counter-attack against terrorism.”

Prince Ghazi has done more to bridge the gap between the Western and Muslim worlds than Obama has.

That’s just two candidates that met the Nobel jury’s qualifications for Obama, but exceeded Obama’s contributions.

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ANOTHER Example Of The Government Destroying Global Warming Data

Guess I have to add this to ‘The Comprehensive Link List Disproving Man-Made Global Warming.’

Big time hat tip goes to Atlas Shrugs (which you should read every day).

In the wake of a revelation by a key research institution that it destroyed its original climate data, the Competitive Enterprise Institute petitioned EPA to reopen a major global warming proceeding.

In mid-August the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) disclosed that it had destroyed the raw data for its global surface temperature data set because of an alleged lack of storage space.  The CRU data have been the basis for several of the major international studies that claim we face a global warming crisis.  CRU’s destruction of data, however, severely undercuts the credibility of those studies.

In a declaration filed with CEI’s petition, Cato Institute scholar and climate scientist Patrick Michaels calls CRU’s revelation “a totally new element” that “violates basic scientific principles, and “throws even more doubt” on the claims of global warming alarmists.

CEI’s petition, filed late Monday with EPA, argues that CRU’s disclosure casts a new cloud of doubt on the science behind EPA’s proposal to regulate carbon dioxide.  EPA stopped accepting public comments in late June but has not yet issued its final decision.  As CEI’s petition argues, court rulings make it clear that agencies must consider new facts when those facts change the underlying issues.

CEI general counsel Sam Kazman stated, “EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data.  But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable.  If EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”

Among CRU’s funders are the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy – U.S. taxpayers.

Read their petition here.

I’m BAAAAAACK!

After a brief period of time off … I’m back in the swing of things to piss a bunch of you off, and to provide daily motivation for those of you with brains.